Memoirs of the youngest Holocaust survivors, recorded as lessons of hope and faith.
The littlest survivors.
It is remarkable that, during the Holocaust, any children survived trains and camps, hideouts and harassment, loss and longing. But many lived to tell their tales. This book collects previously published memoirs from those young survivors. Children were hidden by a village, cloistered in a convent, smuggled into changed names and changed cultures. Many were converted to Catholicism. Many only came to understand their Jewish origins late in life. It is miraculous that some could witness epic brutality and report it. Writes Zula Hass, “Armed with pitchforks, knives, and axes, the Ukrainians dragged Jews out of their homes, and a vicious pogrom erupted right in front of my eyes! Terror-stricken, I stood behind the curtains of our second-floor windows and watched. A drunken peasant pulled down Stalin’s statue from its pedestal, then dragging a Jewish toddler, he smashed his little head against the statue. Other Ukrainians brutally hacked to death the howling mother and father who were hugging the body of their child.” There are tales of hairbreadth escapes: One girl gets out of Tarnopol, in Ukraine, just 11 days before the city’s Jewish population was gassed. There are tales of reunions. Salomea Kape-Jay recalls meeting a friend from Auschwitz, years later, barely recognizing her out of her rags. She remembers the friend telling her in the camp: “Have hope against hope.” Kape-Jay adds: “The alchemy of her words gave me strength.” This is a book of alchemy, a set of stories of young people who turned fear into faith. This is, nevertheless, a hard book to read cover to cover. It is a book to read selectively, finding a memory here and there, gaining hope for difficult times.
Memoirs of the youngest Holocaust survivors, recorded as lessons of hope and faith.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781772604429
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Second Story Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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